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  Anthony and Cleopatra

  William Shakespeare

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  A full cast classic recording of one of Shakespeares best-loved tragedies.

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  Stories of Ships and the Sea...

  Jack London

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  5 Exciting short stories by one of Americas best story tellers. - Chris Farrington: Able Seaman - Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan - The Lost Poacher - The Banks of the Sacramento - In Yeddo Bay

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  The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

  E. T. A. Hoffmann

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  This timeless story written in 1816 continues to enchant audiences of all ages. When young Marie Stahlbaum's favorite Christmas toy, the Nutcracker, comes alive, she realizes that she is about to start the adventure of a lifetime. After defeating the evil Mouse King in battle, her handsome Nutcracker whisks her away to a magical kingdom populated by dolls.

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  The Death of Ivan Ilyitch

  Leo Tolstoy

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  Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality

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  Bleak House

  Charles Dickens

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  Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several sub-plots, and is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of Bleak House is a long-running legal case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which comes about because a testator has written several conflicting wills. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens claimed there were many actual precedents for his fictional case. One such was probably the Thellusson v Woodford case in which a will read in 1797 was contested and not determined until 1859. Though many in the legal profession criticised Dickens's satire as exaggerated, this novel helped support a judicial reform movement which culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s.There is some debate among scholars as to when Bleak House is set. The English legal historian Sir William Holdsworth sets the action in 1827; however, reference to preparation for the building of a railway in Chapter LV suggests the 1830s.

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  Rhapsody

  Dorothy Edwards

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  Dorothy Edwards, an only child, was born on the 18th August 1902 at Ogmore Vale in Glamorgan. 
   
  Her father was a headmaster and an early activist in the Independent Labour Party.  At age 9 Dorothy, dressed in red, welcomed Keir Hardy on to the stage at Tonypandy during the national coal strike of 1912. She was taught that revolution was at hand, that class barriers would be a thing of the past. 
    
  Dorothy won a scholarship and boarded at Howell's School for Girls in Llandaff before moving to University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire where she read Greek and philosophy. 
   
  Her early hopes to be an opera singer were set to one side after graduating and the death of her father. Instead she took on part-time work to supplement her mother’s pension with whom she now lived. 
   
  Dorothy managed to write a number of short stories which appeared in the literary journals of the day.  She spent several months with her mother in Vienna, all the time revising or writing before embarking on ‘Winter Sonata’, a short novel published in 1928. 
   
  Introductions to several members of the Bloomsbury Group meant a move to London and a division of her time between child-care for the family of Bloomsbury author David Garnett and the promise of an advance payment for her work on a new volume of stories. 
   
  However, Dorothy’s life was starting to spiral out of control; she was attracted to the Welsh nationalist movement but felt that her Welsh provincialism made her, in London at least, feel socially inferior. Leaving her mother dependent on a hired companion consumed her with guilt as did the end of an affair with a married musician. 
   
  On the 5th January 1934, having spent the morning burning her papers, Dorothy Edwards threw herself in front of a train near Caerphilly railway station.  
   
  Her suicide note read: "I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life. I have accepted kindness and friendship and even love without gratitude, and given nothing in return."

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